Within the industry, we have facts and figures on the prevalence and importance of personal branding using virtual environments. What we often lack, however, is the human element: a psychological, emotional, and social understanding of what our websites or profile pages on online networks truly mean.
The Book
Enter Dr. Sam Gosling, University of Texas professor, and author of Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You. Although Snoop primarily focuses on gleaning personality insights from physical locations such as cubicles, music collections, bookshelves, and dressing areas, Gosling also explores email monikers, personal websites and profile pages.The results of this inquiry confirm many deeply held assumptions and have important ramifications for Micronation and personal branding.
The Study
Gosling’s model divides an individual’s personality into five OCEAN traits including Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. Study participants used this model to describe themselves both as they are (actual self-reports) and as they’d like to be (ideal self-reports).
Researchers then recruited judges who relied solely on a participant’s website to form impressions of the individual along the same OCEAN traits. The judges’ reports were compared to the individual’s actual and ideal self-reports to produce insights into how well our online presence truly represents us.
The Results
One of the major findings from the research indicates that “websites are extraordinarily good places to learn about people—perhaps the best of all places.” Website findings were “at least as accurate” as what was learned from the physical locations and accurate “across a much broader array of personality variables” with websites proving useful for learning about all five OCEAN traits.
Interestingly, the judges’ impressions “converged more strongly” with the individual’s actual self-reports than with their ideal self-reports- “suggesting once again that people want to be seen as they are, not as they’d like to be.” These findings are present “perhaps even more strongly” in network profile pages.
Further research on the accuracy of Facebook pages indicates that aside from extraversion levels, people typically have little understanding about the impressions their profiles convey. Gosling asks, “If you have no idea about how you are seen, how can you construct a phony self-portrait?”
Next, Gosling turned to usernames and email monikers. They can give us “clues” about how people see themselves, especially their “sense of competence.” Observers given only an email address and gender were “surprisingly accurate at judging the owner’s extraversion and, to a lesser extent, openness.”
The Implications
Gosling’s findings suggest that we are very much justified in our attempts to learn about our colleagues, clients and potential employees through digital resources. An online presence presents an “infinitely complex and fine grained portrait” of a person which may prove more accurate than we often assume. This online content provides insight that resumes and cover letters are simply unable to convey.
Given that many fail to proactively sculpt their online presence, our e is a unique opportunity to elicit more meaningful engagement in work relations, demonstrate higher perceived value through technology, and differentiate by broadcasting character insights.
